Personal Responsibility for All

The U.S. seems to me to be in a peculiar and schizoid place with respect to its purported cultural values.  On the one hand, the importance of personal responsibility is touted.  Typically the personal responsibility meme is laid against the tableau of meritocracy.  The notion being that the U.S. is a meritocracy; therefore, personal responsibility is of the highest value since the only way a meritocracy can work is if individuals are allowed to achieve or fail according to their abilities and efforts.  This personal responsibility/meritocracy notion squares with the historical antipathy Americans have outwardly expressed toward monarchy and aristocracy.  Obviously the aristocratic form of social organization is antithetic to the meritocratic vision because it places birthright above ingenuity.

On the other hand, many public policies that provide a mechanism for ensuring that the U.S. remains (at least in name) a meritocracy are derided as unfairly punishing the successful among us.  The estate tax is an example.  The very persons who fetishize personal responsibility are often the same ones that decry the estate tax, which they inartfully call the "death tax."  The idea behind the estate tax, aside from producing revenue for the government, is to prevent the establishment of a landed gentry of sorts in the U.S.   The notion that individuals should be responsible for their achievement has long been a staple of American ideology.  The estate tax furthers this idea by attempting to prevent the intergenerational transfer of wealth from becoming the de facto method of achieving success.  If Henry Ford built an automobile empire through his ingenuity and efforts, shouldn't the path be cleared for other persons of equal ingenuity and effort be given an open playing field in which they can parlay their ingenuity and efforts into similar success rather than allowing the children of Henry Ford to reap the benefits of their father's individual efforts without having to match the efforts themselves?  If no policy exists to make the intergenerational transfer of wealth more difficult, then the meritocracy will be diminished and in its place an inherited aristocracy will arise.  The space available for individuals who have not inherited wealth to build their own corporate empires will be diminished.

The difference in attitudes person's have toward their families versus public policy in the abstract explain the schizoid views to a point.  Anyone who has had a child understands that when a stated policy preference will have a specific negative effect on his or her child, he or she will almost always choose the interests of the child over the policy preference.  Frankly, this is how society should work as long as the family remains the basic unit of social organization.  The same logic applies to the estate tax:  it makes perfect sense that persons who are able to give an inheritance to their children will want to do so with the least encumbrance possible.  Parents are supposed to take care of their children.

However, the individual case should not determine the general.  The estate tax is designed so that only estates considered large will be taxed.  The threshold for taxation is intentionally set by policy makers at a level that should not prevent persons from taking care of their offspring through the mechanism of inheritance.  The threshold for taxation is intended to be set at a point where an estate is large enough that its unencumbered transfer will do more than take care of the kids.  The policy behind the tax is that we should not allow so much  wealth to be transferred that the beneficiaries will be able to remove themselves from the productive economy.  In essence, we have the tax so we do not have a class of individuals who are positioned at the highest reaches of success without having made an individual contribution to that success.  In plain English, we want persons to be responsible for their own success.

Much of the demonization of the estate tax is a chimera anyway.  If one has enormous wealth, the estate tax will not prevent that person from leaving enough behind so his or her children will never have to be productive members of the economy.  The scions of the enormously wealthy will never have to work if their deceased parents do not want them to.  Let's face it:  if Steve Jobs leaves the bulk of his estate to his family, even if the maximum estate tax is applied and the estate has no mechanism to avoid the tax in it entirety, his family will be left with enough to live for generations without having the need to get a job.  There are still Rockefellers living off the largesse of John D.'s estate.

Critics of the estate tax point to persons of lesser means who nevertheless have large enough estates to be subject to taxation.  The charge against the estate tax is that it is unfair to hamstring these persons from the unencumbered transfer of inherited wealth to their children.  These are not the Steve Jobs's or Warren Buffets's of the world who have so much that the estate tax does not in effect matter.  What of the argument that the estate tax is unfair to them?

The answer is quite simply that fairness in the context of the estate tax should be measured in the equality of opportunity that it promotes across society rather than the fairness to an individual decedent.  If we are going to have a policy that attempts to prevent the establishment of a wealth-based aristocracy, a line must be drawn somewhere.  The line will invariably be seen as unfair to those who lie on the side of the line to which the tax is applied.  That is no argument against it, though.  If the tax fulfills its functions, the effect will be that few persons will be able to remove themselves from the productive economy and live off their inheritances without working.  This is the point of the tax.  I would think that the advocates of maximizing the personal responsibility of U.S. citizens would embrace the estate tax insofar as it results in greater numbers of persons having to find productive means to care for themselves.  Living off a trust fund requires no personal responsibility for one's own welfare.

The idea of a meritocratic society driven by the acceptance of personal responsibility is an attractive one.  In practice, though, the very proponents of the idea often advocate policies that allow for the diminution of personal responsibility.  The estate tax is a good example.  If it is offensive for the mythic "welfare queen" to live off the public dole without having to work, then it should be similarly offensive for trust fund kids to be able to live off the inherited dole without having to work.  If we are going to be a nation that touts personal responsibility as one of its ideals and chief attributes, then we should be consistent in requiring personal responsibility from every member of society, not just the least fortunate.

Saul Bellow in The New York Review of Books

My first Bellow book was Henderson the Rain King.  I fell in love with Bellow's writing almost instantly.  The New York Review of Books has a two-part series in which the transcript of a talk Bellow gave in 1988 is being published.  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/oct/27/jewish-writer-america/

A sample, "One's language is a spiritual location, it houses your soul.  If you were born in America all essential communications, your deepest communications with yourself, will be in English--in American English.  You will neither lie nor tell the truth in any other language.  Without it no basic reckonings can be made.  You will not reflect on your own death in Hebrew or in French.  Your English is the principal instrument of your humanity.  And when the door of the gas chamber was shut many of the German Jews who called upon God for the last time inevitably used the language of their murders, for they had no other."

Quibble with Bellow's universal assertion for American English among those born here if you must.  Still, the point about language being a spiritual location is a beautiful one worth considering.  The passage is typical, to me, of Bellow's ability to meld the literary, the philosophical, and the pragmatic assessment of the situation in which we find ourselves.

Taxation with Representation

Vanity Fair has a good article about Alexander Hamilton, government debt, and the Tea Party's skewed take on history. http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/11/debt-and-dumb-201111 

It still does not cease to amaze me that the Tea Party associates itself with a movement that was ostensibly based on a government that was taxing citizens who did not have representation in that government.  I am waiting for someone to explain for me how a movement in a representative democracy can hold any claim to legitimacy when it does not lack representation.  If it so happens that the Tea Party position is a minority one then the movement's complaints are anti-democratic to the extent the movement advocates implementation of its policies without a majority in Congress or control of the White House.  If the movement cannot get a majority of representatives elected who share the movement's views, then those views by right should not be implemented.  That would be the essence of a representative democracy, right?